


Personae Non Gratae

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Greywing and the Flying Outlaws [6]
Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Assassination, Earth-3, F/M, Family, Family Issues, Female Character In Command, Finally!, Gen, Humor, Language Barrier, Loyalty, Mirror Universe, Politics, Royalty, Tamaran, Teamwork, basically all the plot in this series comes from kori, outlaws in space, she has life goals, they are literally being queen of the world, unfortunately it was paradise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-10-29 11:07:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10852713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Getting into outer space is now easy.Family remains hard.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Outlaws are back, at long last! 
> 
> Now, DCU outer space has mostly been developed through Green Lantern, whose sense of scale is both inane and insane even for sci-fi, and Legion of Superheroes, which is goofy, but I'm trying to work with the canon. More or less. Tamaran has variously been referred to as being in the Vega 'system' or the Vega 'galaxy,' but it's in a whole separate Sector from Earth, so...far away. (And honestly like half a dozen intelligent species canonically live there so I tend to assume it's not just one star system.)
> 
> The name of Kori's House was established in her first appearance. I'm...actually not sure it ever came up again? Huh. ^^;

It’s not a long trip, as interstellar voyages go. Could be longer, at least. At the same time, it is an _insanely_ long trip. The Vega system—that’s what the star cluster's actual inhabitants call it, the fact that there’s a star near Earth called that is just a coincidence—is in a completely different _galaxy_.

Not even a relatively local galaxy. Human astronomers may have observed and named it; Roy has no idea. It’s called _Hu’lukkori_ in Tamaranean, which just means _our pool of stars._ Points for sense of perspective; Tamaraneans apparently aren’t big on traveling outside their star system most of the time, but they’ve been in contact with intergalactic society since before humans figured out metal was a thing.

When the cab arrived, Kori gave the driver (blue, roughly spherical, five limbs, no respect for its passengers) her address in a list of locations starting from ‘Sector 2828’ and working _down_ to the name of her planet. Roy normally only specifies his point of origin _up_ to the scale of planet when he’s being _facetious._

It’s enough to make a man feel awfully small.

Earth has had contact with aliens—Luthor has been _buying shit off of aliens_ —for decades, but the Martian and Thanagarian incursions made space scary, so even with Luthor’s steady efforts people don’t get offworld much, and most visitors to Earth from outside don’t actually want to be there. (Oliver used to complain, with no sense of irony, that without assholes like Ultraman crashing around grandstanding he bet they’d have a space fleet already, and Roy wonders if by the time he gets home Luthor will have made that happen. The economy and government were awfully trashed by the time they were done. Might not be able to pay for it.)

Within the context of his planet, Roy was a pretty cosmopolitan mofo, but on any larger scale, he was clueless. Until he met Kori, the only words in any alien language he knew were the Martian for ‘surrender,’ a Kryptonian swear word Ultraman once used in his hearing before literally kicking a dude’s head off, and that gargle-sounding blessing GGGodfrey used when he signed off his TV show the final time after admitting he was, in fact, from outer space.

By the time Roy agreed to go into space, he only knew a few dozen more.

Kori told him to bring all his stuff, and he was surprised that the ship had a cargo area with plenty of space for that, plus individual cabins and three other rooms on top of that, but then he found out they were going to be on this trip for over a week. This was less hiring a taxi than chartering a bus. Or a boat. But it’s already called a ship so he’s sort of run out of metaphor.

The point is, there are ships out there that could get them where they’re going faster, but Kori opted for cargo space and comfort, and ten days to spend drilling her entourage in her native language and etiquette. It is a crying shame that her language-absorption trick doesn’t work in reverse. Roy has been in space four days and spent twelve hours out of every day practicing his vocabulary. At least Kori is the hottest schoolteacher ever.

It’s completely unfair that the quasi-mute dude is doing better than he is. He complained, and Grayson looked at him flatly for a few seconds and said, “I already know thirty languages.”

Jackass. Roy knows three. That's a good number when it's not _one-tenth_ of somebody else's count.

He knows without asking that Komand’r’s ship was built for speed. Even if they rushed, she’d have beaten them back by a mile. She might be crowned already by the time they get there. He wonders if Kori hopes so. It might make some things easier.

* * *

 Eventually they do reach their destination.

The cab driver—he has a fancier title than that; Roy mostly just calls him ‘pilot’ out loud—has to radio down for permission to land. He’s warned them they probably don’t want to hang around the cockpit for this part, which is likely to involve a couple of boring hours in orbit, waiting on landing approval to clear; they’ve ignored him. If asked, Roy would cite paranoia, but he’s mostly just nosy. “This is registered transport skiff 7899-43554, the _Floating Pinwheel._ I’ve got three passengers requesting permission to land. A Princess Koriand’r, and two aliens from sector 2814.”

It turned out Earth isn’t well known enough to space people to even get made fun of, but Space Sector 2814 at least gets one of those haha-nothing-comes-from-there-what-a-backwater reactions. Flattering as _hell_ , guys.

After the speakers buzz in his ear with some reply from the surface, the pilot pulls what Roy’s gotten to recognize as a surprised expression and turns to them. “Looks like you’re expected. We’re cleared for landing.”

The Outlaws exchange a long, speaking glance. They thought this might happen. Blackfire _has_ to have realized what it could mean that she let Kori steal her fannypack, with her phone and credit card. The question is, are they expected as invited guests…or as an attempted murderer and her accomplices, waltzing in bold as brass?

Roy gets their baggage piled up just inside the door, so they can get it out quick just in case they decide to stay, but the driver wants to bug out.

They’re directed down through the upper airspace without seeing any other ships, but as they sink toward a rambling, plant-festooned city Roy does see some parked, so it’s not that _no one_ ever comes or goes here from space.

As they get closer, the airspace starts to be clogged—both with vehicles, though not that many, and with _people_. He knew everyone was going to be able to fly, but it’s still different seeing it. At first, they’re so high up that the flitting redgold forms look like the kind of fairies old ladies and little girls look for in their back yards, but that doesn’t last long.

There don’t seem to be any traffic regulations whatsoever, and the taxi driver starts swearing and gripping the controls with four limbs and the seat with the fifth, after the first time a sort of flying bus nearly sideswipes them.

“Why are there all these flying cars?” Roy asks Kori, after they narrowly avoid a head-on collision with what looks like somebody’s grandma. She shakes her withered fist at them; it is genuinely threatening. “Are there a lot of people like your sister used to be?”

Kori looks down her nose at him. “There are a lot of ground-crawling vehicles where you come from,” she says. “Is that because you have so many cripples unable to walk?”

“Touché,” Roy allows. He detected the faint snuffling noise that was Dick laughing at him, and sends a glare that way. Dick looks back at him all alabaster innocence.

Kori scowls out the window. “There are more vehicles than there should be,” she says. “I suppose people have come in from all over the planet for the _coronation_.”

The driver finally gets decent directions from ground control, and takes them up above the traffic again briefly to hop over most of the city to the tallest, fanciest building, and sink down toward a sort of broad stone patio on one of its upper levels.

“Palace?” Roy asks. It sort of reminds him of Mayan ruins, except not ruined, and stupidly tall for something made of stone.

Kori nods. Her eyes are practically burning a hole through the windshield, and since that’s something she could _actually do_ with her hands if she tried, Roy decides not to bug her any more. He tries exchanging a glance with Grayson, but it takes a beat longer than usual for the guy to notice he’s being looked at, and when he looks back it’s noticeably a struggle for him to get his face to convey an expression other than the bland little smile that pops up when he’s _trying_ not to be creepy, but not really there with you.

The Talon’s tense, too. Wonderful. This is really helping Roy relax.

The taxi sets down; its door telescopes open.

A small fanfare on brass instruments erupts from the side of the landing pad, and someone calls out in Tamaranean. Roy knows enough at this point to make out Kori’s formal title:

“ _Koriand’r, princess of the House of Tykayl!_ ” A second later, as Roy and Dick emerge flanking her, the announcer—a mostly naked man a paler shade of gold-orange than Kori, with his curly auburn hair cut in a mullet—adds a slightly abashed phrase that Roy suspects is along the lines of _and guests_.

Having the landing pad on a patio like this—besides showing huge faith in their own engineering because spaceships _cannot possibly_ be light—is probably fine for a race of flying people, but Roy is feeling uncomfortably cornered.

Then a door opens in the cliff-like side of the building, and Komand’r comes out. For whatever reason, she doesn’t get a fanfare. Maybe they were buttering Kori up, or maybe that’s just a ‘welcome home from your trip’ ritual. Kori’s cram sessions focused on the bare bones of protocol that would actually affect them. “Koriand’r. I’m glad you could make it,” Blackfire says, in English. She’s smiling. There’s no sign of any bruising from the fight a week and a half ago, or any coldness, unless you count not using Kori’s nickname. “The opening ceremonies are in three days. There’s a banquet in your honor tonight.”

“Great,” says Kori brusquely. “I’m starving.”

Kom doesn’t seem offended. “Come on,” she says, and turns like she’s going to lead them into the palace with no more drama than that.

If Kori isn’t going to bring it up, someone has to. “Princess,” Roy says gruffly. Blackfire turns her head, a little sharply, and stops again, and he clears his throat. They’re speaking English, so the several witnesses hanging around are probably irrelevant, but you never know. “About…what happened on Earth.”

She smiles again, a little sadly, and turns to Kori. “It’s fine,” she says. “I should have realized it would be hard for you to hear. It’s enough that you’re here now.”

Feeling runs over Kori’s face, under the skin, where she learned to shove things down when she was bound to Superwoman, but Komand’r doesn’t seem to notice, and when Kori says, a little gruffly, “Well, I could hardly miss your big day,” she _smiles,_ like Kori has made her century.

“It would never have been the same without you,” she says.

Roy wonders if _anyone_ can actually be that naïve, can make it through slavery and war _still_ that naïve, and how, if she’s for real, she’s expected to govern a planet. Even if Tamaraneans aren’t as sneaky and backstabbing as humans when it comes to their politicking, there’s other planets to worry about, and just because they aren’t _as_ sneaky as his species doesn’t mean everybody’s honest.

Maybe she’s faking. Maybe that was actually gloating, and he’s just reading her all wrong. Or maybe she’s only this stupid about people she loves.

He doesn’t actually care, about what’s best for Tamaran or who _deserves_ what, but he can’t help comparing the sisters, weighing up their potential as leaders, because for all he’ll stand by Kori right up until he can tell she’s going to drag him down with her if he stays, there’s a difference between that and actually thinking she _ought_ to win, that she’s the one who _should_ have the position. Oliver taught him to look down on people who tried to make themselves more than they were just by ladder-climbing, like a big desk made a big man. If you focus just on getting ahead, and not on what you’ll do once you get there, then you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Oliver wasn’t that good at taking his own advice. But it was _good_ advice.

So if he doesn’t think Kori can handle what she wants…then he’ll focus a little harder on escape plans and a little less on winning.

They follow Blackfire into the palace, trailed by about half the patio attendants carrying their bags. There are decorative friezes along the corridor, and most of the support columns flare out weirdly above head height, then cut back in, making ledges a few feet deep. (Roy notes these as potentially useful for lurking purposes, then sees someone sitting casually on one and realizes they’re the flying-people equivalent of _benches_. No wonder the ceiling is so high.) “I’ve been asked to take you to the third-smallest receiving chamber,” Kori’s sister tells her, still walking ahead of the parade. “Apologies for the rush. Your friends can duck out if they aren’t up to publicity just now.”

An exchange of glances. Kori is against their ducking out; Dick would obviously like to but defers to her judgment. “We’ll stay,” Roy says.

Komand’r nods, satisfied in an absent sort of way. “Mom and Dad are over the moons—that is a good idiom, I think I will borrow it into Tamaranean,” she adds, this part to Roy for some reason, “so get ready to be embarrassed. I gave English to them and some of the servants, so your friends can be taken care of, but since it’s secondhand they’re all very awkward in the language.”

“Where did you get it?” Roy can’t help asking.

Komand’r shrugs. “Some girl I asked for directions once I got to your planet. You have a greeting ritual which includes a handclasp, yes? Very convenient.”

Probably should not tease Kori or Dick about the kiss thing when a handshake would have been fine. Dick joked about it when the three of them first met up, but who knows what impression Kori wants Blackfire to have of her relationships.

He settles for an eyebrow-waggle behind Komand’r’s back. Kori curls her lip at him, and Dick looks aggressively blank. Hah.

When they get where they’re going there are more guards to open doors for them. The third-smallest receiving chamber turns out to actually be small, as much as you can expect from a room in a palace owned by flying royalty anyway, but the geometric figures on the walls are edged in gold, and the (extremely minimal) clothing worn by most of the couple dozen people waiting there to do the receiving is stupidly ornate. And also gold. The ones in the middle are actually more simply dressed than most of what he assumes are courtiers, but they’re still obviously the king and queen.

The first thing Roy notices about Kori’s parents is that her father has the most epic beard he has ever seen. Possibly the most epic beard that has ever existed. It is like if Kori’s hair was _even redder_ , and attached to someone’s _face_. The fact that he’s put a braid down the middle of it in the attempt to exert some control only serves to emphasize its hugeness. Roy suspects the beard may actually be responsible for the government of Tamarus, while Myand’r is responsible merely for transporting the beard across its domain.

On a more serious note, he’s actually very glad Kori made sure to tell him and Dick everybody’s names and what they did ahead of time, so he doesn’t have to try to memorize that shit _now._

Kori’s mom looks exactly like her, if you filed flat planes into everywhere Kori is curved. Well, okay, not quite _everywhere._ She looks tired and, if you manage to look at his face behind all the hair, so does the king, though he hides it better. Roy only notices because he’s looking, because they don’t seem old (though hey, aliens, how can you tell) but they’re abdicating their thrones, and people don’t usually do that without some kind of good reason. Komand’r said the king’s health was bad.

The crowns are stupid-looking, so Kori’s not missing out on anything in the headgear department.

As soon as Kori is within reach, her mother sweeps her into a fierce hug.

Roy sees the move coming before it happens. He sees Kori shake off her instinctive evasion and counterattack reflexes. He observes that public embraces are, apparently, not a contravention of royal protocol, at least not if they happen between two royals. The queen draws her arms tighter, and slowly Kori seems to decide to hug back.

Roy watches Luand’r’s eyes slip closed and yup, apparently playing it cool is not a requirement of Tamaranean politics. “Koriand’r,” the queen murmurs, and then more words Roy can’t make out and likely doesn’t know, but in the same tone, like she can’t believe how lucky she is. That part, Roy understands just fine.

He looks away. No wonder Kori sabotaged the kidnapping job, if this is what she thinks of when she thinks ‘mother.’ Can’t people volunteer their scruples _ahead of time_ , ever? Gah.

Luand’r lets her daughter go, rubbing tears away with the pad of her thumb, and Myand’r moves forward to envelop Kori in his beard. She seems less than enthused about this, but she _does_ still return the hug.

The king lets go sooner than the queen did, and then sweeps the various courtiers or courtesans or whatever they are up in a look and declares something in his rumbling voice.

“Come,” Komand’r tells them, possibly a literal translation of what Myand’r is saying. Roy is so thrown off by the rumble, he has no idea. “We must present you to Tamarus.”

The doors opposite the ones they came in through swing open, and then huge double doors a little way past those, and then they’re all herded out onto a…stage, basically. Stadium seating marches up in every direction, carved into the rock of the mountainside the doors open on, but a lot of people are just kinda floating so it’s even more crowded than the seating allows. Most of them are in shades of bronze and gold; there’s no one quite as pale as Blackfire, or with hair as dark, but the variation is pretty wide. Roy was already prepared for a public appearance, so he takes it all in and focuses on not doing anything dumb.

Grayson froze for a split second when the crowd was revealed, but now he’s letting Blackfire and the attendants maneuver him forward and into place. Luckily no one is trying to separate them very far from Kori, or from each other at all, or there might be some very public bloodletting.

If Grayson had flipped out in a crowd on Earth, Roy would be fairly confident in their ability to cut their way out and get away clean. Here, not so much. He hopes their lunatic holds it together.

Blackfire stands behind him and Grayson, on a slightly higher tier of dais at the back of the stage, which given her height means she has to bend a little to keep up her quiet translation of what’s going on up front. It makes his neck prickle, especially whenever her breath gusts across the back of it, but he really likes having a clue what’s going on, so he doesn’t let it show.

Roy manages to keep up that poker face even when Kori presents him to her father and to all of Tamarus as: “King String-Plucker, the Master of War-Instruments.” She says his actual name, too, but given how often she uses translations of Tamaranean names when speaking English, he shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the _content_ of the name that’s considered important in this society, more than the actual syllables of sound. Which is…kind of homey, actually.

He hadn’t even realized she’d _noticed_ his last name was a word, let alone that harps and bows both have ‘strings.’ She turned him into a _pun_ and nobody outside her family (and possibly some servants) has a clue.

People are going to be asking him what he’s king of. Even as Myand'r goes through a dramatic presentation of Kori that noticeably fails to mention that she was ever the official heir to the throne, Roy’s already crafting hilarious half-lies about his lost kingdom in the City of Stars, destroyed by the treachery of the same villains that had imprisoned Princess Koriand’r.

It’s basically true. If everything hadn’t fallen apart, he would have taken over from Oliver eventually, assuming either he’d outlived the old jackass or that Queen decided to step down while alive, to oversee an orderly transition and enjoy retirement. And it was _so fucking the Big Three’s fault_ that the Black Bow got dragged into a worthless world war and then _lost._ So really, they can _all_ blame their problems on the Injustice ringleaders. Hah.

Dick gets announced as “Greywing, the Silent, called ‘ _Richard Grayson’_ in his own language,” and the minute easing of his shoulders that Roy only spots because he knows to look for it says that this might be why she bothered with their actual names at all. She knows it matters to Grayson.

Roy wonders if the difference between his grandiose introduction and Dick’s understated one was for his benefit, as well as the ninja’s. Everyone will pay more attention to him, and let Dick fade into the background. But so long as he can live up to expectations, she’s set him up to get at least a modicum of respect.

He told her he didn’t want to be anyone’s crippled pet alien. She _listened._

This might not be so bad after all.

* * *

It turns out Kori owns a spaceship. It’s a sleek red number with insanely comfortable seats, that’s parked out behind the palace, almost precisely where Kori left it. Apparently it got pressed into service during the war for fighting outside the atmosphere and took some damage, but Blackfire had it fixed up just like before, as soon as she could.

Kori sweeps the entire vessel for bugs twice over before she flops down in the swiveling pilot’s seat, scowling magnificently, limbs splayed around her. Roy’s never thought of her outfits as particularly modest, but comparing her to everyone else on Tamaran, the way she always keeps her back, belly, and breasts covered is practically a burqa.

He knows why, of course. He’s seen the scars. He knows what Superwoman was like.

He won’t say anything.

“So,” he says instead, claiming a sort of reclining couch along the starboard side of the cockpit-cabin. (Of course since it’s a spaceship every side is starboard, but he still _thinks_ in English even if he’s got all this alien vocabulary to juggle now.) Grayson perches on the opposite one. They’ve got an hour or so before Kori’s welcome-home banquet. “What’s the plan.”

“The same as it always was,” says their princess firmly. “I regain my birthright.”

Roy knows he grimaces. The logistics at this point are a total pain. Her forces are the three of them, she’s out of practice and out of date on the terrain and they just got here, her political connections are shaky, and basically anything they do has to be done in complete secrecy, or the goose is en flambé.

“You object.”

“I’ve got… _reservations._ ”

“Scruples?”

Roy snorts, because _she’s_ the one who wussed out of their last job halfway through. “Not so much.”

The look Kori turns on him is severe, demanding. Colder than she usually was on Earth, he feels like, at least with him—with them—but…maybe he’s just imagining things. “What, then?”

“ _Concerns,_ ” he says. “Look, this is politics, I’m not the biggest fan of politics and that’s mostly because the stakes are huge and it’s hard to know enough to even pretend you’re in control, and that’s when I’m on my home planet, where I actually know the players and they can’t all _fly_. Is there seriously a way to do this that does not end in our public execution?”

“My parents would never kill me,” Kori says. It’s more withering than that edgy confidence Roy thinks of as characteristic. “I’m much more valuable alive, and besides they’re sentimental. They might kill you, though.”

“Thanks. That’s very reassuring.”

Kori tosses locks of hair back over both shoulders. “You are always so ready to be defeated, Roy.”

“I just like to know when something’s too big for me, is all,” Roy shoots back. “My last outfit got ripped to shreds trying to get in on ruling the world.”

“Yeah, he probably doesn’t want to see a second Queen beheaded,” puts in Grayson blandly.

Roy’s train of thought derails completely for a second. “Was that…”

The corners of Grayson’s mouth twitch, and Roy leans over across the cockpit to punch him—not at all gently, but only on the shoulder. “That was totally on purpose! Oh my god, what about space has turned you two into _punmeisters_ , we are discussing matters of grave planetary importance and you are making jokes about my _traumatic experiences_ , what is wrong with you.”

Grayson may actually be some kind of secret social savant, though, because the gathering tension Kori had been wrapped in has cleared up a lot, and she’s snorting at their antics. She settles down to brooding face again quick enough, but it feels safer to go on disagreeing with her, now. Roy leans back into his own seat, crosses his legs and props an elbow on top of the backrest of his sofa-thing.

“Okay,” he says, “what I don’t get is, why it’s such a problem. The insult, sure, but why it calls for drastic action to fix I don’t see. You’re still Blackfire’s heir, like you were your dad’s. First in line, just like you expected to be. It’s not like she’s got kids.”

Well, _yet,_ but if that changes Kori could deal with it then, it doesn’t need preempting _now._

Kori rolls her eyes. “Except that my _sister_ cannot be counted upon to die or step aside within a reasonable time frame.”

“I dunno, her sense of self-preservation doesn’t seem too hot,” Roy muses. Though she _did_ make it through a war, so that's _something_.

Kori shoots him a fiercely unamused look, still too steamed to appreciate jokes at her expense even if she acknowledges ones aimed at him. At this point Roy is almost looking forward to when his teammates inevitably accelerate past a glacial pace in their weirdo courtship, if only because if she gets laid Kori will _have_ to lighten up a little. Well, hopefully. He doesn’t actually know for sure Tamaraneans work like that, but the odds seem good, especially with all the PDA he saw just _in the audience_ at their reception earlier.

“Which is why,” she says pointedly, “we should find it easy to make it look like an accident.”

Roy’s spine tingles uneasily. _Damn_ , he hopes that bug sweep was thorough enough. And yes, okay, the casual way Starfire approaches the idea of bumping off a family member still throws him. He’s seen people do that kind of thing in the business, sure; it was pretty bad form, but the traditional-minded Mafia guys putting family first meant sometimes the straightest road to advancement in those organizations ran through a blood relative’s chest.

It wasn’t actually that different from the arrow Roy’d have put in Conner Hawke’s eye if the kid had come nosing around, if there’d been anything _left_ to inherit for long after Queen was killed.

He just…he never had any family of his own to kill, or not, and their organization was an up-and-comer without that old-world bloodline baggage to worry about, so it hadn’t come up in anyone he worked with closely before this.

He expected it to start bothering him less after more exposure, but hanging around watching Blackfire be understanding and forgiving enough to gag your average saint, because she loves her sister, has just made the bad taste in his mouth worse. It’s _instinct_ to take advantage of that kind of stupid, but killing her seems…well, calling something ‘wrong’ doesn’t come naturally to him, but that’s the general feeling. He has his limits.

“You don’t want to do that,” states Grayson, before Roy can come up with anything to say that doesn’t make him sound like either a bleeding-heart or a yes-man. (Or like he’s trying to use the way Kori fucked up the Kord job as leverage to make her give up her dreams.)

Kori’s eyes snap. “You are telling me what I _want?_ ”

 _Danger, abort,_ Roy mouths. Dick ignores him. _Dick._ “You said it would be hard to assume the throne if the people found out you’d killed for it,” he states. Kori doesn’t entirely stop bristling, but nods sharply. “You are the one who stands to benefit from any harm to Komand’r. She may have told someone about your attempt on Earth.”

“He’s right,” Roy chimes in, relieved that the logistical argument is actually getting somewhere. “If anything happens to your big sis, people are going to suspect foul play.”

“You would have me _submit?_ ”

“Wait,” Grayson counters. “Never act when you are expected, in assassination. I _am_ a professional,” he adds stolidly, lacing his fingers together.

A professional who got most of his training from the lunatic who then sent him to melodramatically fail to off the POTUS’s kids, thinks Roy, but it’s still true. He’s done assassin work of his own, of course, but it was mob stuff, generally. Not political. And when it was political, he just sniped where he was told, or played support for heavier hitters. Grayson was trained for a different playing field. “He is the expert,” is all he says out loud. “You don’t _have_ to take our advice, Star. But you’ve got it.”

Advice, therefore advisor, and he sees her ease up a little when he offers her that out. It’s second nature, to be honest—Oliver hated to feel like he was being told what to do, too.

“Very well. But should opportunity arise, we _will_ take advantage.”

Roy nods, hoping his bad feeling is just pessimism.

He still thinks Kori has a sweet deal, here, and it’s a stupid waste to throw it away with scheming. If Roy had had something like this to go home to, he would never have been a criminal in the first place—not that he thinks he would have been a stand-up guy or anything, but…why let yourself in for trouble when you don’t _need_ to? Excitement, sure, but.

No matter what Kori’s been through, that he knows he can’t understand, he still thinks it’s a waste.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tamaraneans rely on their weird touch-telepathy trick for languages, but there's a translation convention in effect often enough I assume there are universal translators out there besides Green Lantern rings. The taxi driver had a babelfish or something.
> 
> *thump* i ded.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was...only like three and a half months. That's not super long, right guys? Guys? >>;

So they settle in to get ready for Komand’r’s opening coronal ceremonies in three days. Kori’s feast is nice, surprisingly edible after Roy’s first impression of how they eat here was based on the terrible premise of a raw meat and artichoke salad.

It’s a formal event. Very public. Apparently if there weren’t the coronation coming up they’d have gone on some kind of _super fun_ ritual hunt that Myand’r is apparently _really bad at_ as a family, to welcome Kori home, but as it is they just eat a whole bunch of food in a very formal atmosphere at a high table, with a bunch of people eating more of the same feast at lower tables nearby.

Kom is seated at the queen’s right hand, Kori at the king’s left; Roy at _her_ left, and Dick at his. He doesn’t know how seating charts work on this planet, but he doubts they’re going to get the same level of deference at parties _not_ based around Kori. Or maybe they’ll always be seated with her because they’re her guests?

Grayson is too wound up to talk much and Kori is mostly focused on her father, so Roy mostly stays quiet too. He can’t really make conversation with the people across the table, his Tamaranean isn’t good enough and Blackfire isn’t standing behind him whispering translations. And he’s _not_ mind-melding with everybody he meets just so they can chat.

Kori translates some things, when she remembers, mostly when she’s not talking to the king because he's doing something else. She seems to be...getting along with him okay? Roy can't understand a single thing they're saying, so. Lots of speeches are made regarding the guest of honor, a slightly awkward number of people reminisce about her as a little kid. Her laugh, they remember nostalgically, her talent on the practice courts, her pride in her first grown-up set of armor, notable things she said as a kid. It’s sort of sweet how many of them have fond personal anecdotes, but Roy can’t help noticing how there’s none that cover any point after somewhere in, oh, her mid-teens.

Because that’s presumably when she wound up enslaved in space. She’s almost _thirty._

None of them know who she is now. Roy doesn’t think they really care to get to know, either. Grayson looks around at him during the speeches, just once, and makes one of his minimalist expressions that Roy’s been learning to read better these days, ever since Grayson stopped carefully emoting like a normal person all the time around him, but didn’t go back to actively trying to say _nothing at all ever_ with his face, the way he did when he was Talon.

Grayson's resting deadface is actually helpful, for once, because _Roy_ knows he’s looking disapproving, but he’s pretty sure none of the aliens do.

Everybody but Dick, Roy, Komand’r, and Luand’r drinks a little too much, and by the end of the night Kori is laughing with her head thrown back and Roy can’t be sorry they’re here, even if they’re inevitably going to be drawn and quartered and fired into the sun. (Which shows just how done for he is, yes, he gets that, but his last reaction to noticing that got him held to a counter at knifepoint and he stuck around, so fine. He has ninety percent of all his eggs in this basket and it’s his job to keep the basket from getting carried to hell.)

He keeps expecting Kori’s anger to get out of her control now that she’s drunk. She’s got murder on the mind and she’s not _subtle._ But besides leaning across both her parents once to punch Kom in the side of the head, which is apparently normal behavior and sets off no alarms, she does nothing.

Nothing.

Irrationally, it makes Roy more worried.

They’re released from the endless feast about an hour after Roy couldn’t comfortably eat any more, and led up to the very top of the palace. Apparently the servants made up beds—well, couches, but they’re couches-for-sleeping-on—for Dick and Roy in adjoining rooms near Kori’s, but after sort of peeking in the door of their suite, they all go into hers first.

“Nothing’s changed,” she says, and her voice goes a little shaky. Roy isn’t sure whether she’s going to cry or scream. He doesn’t think _she’s_ sure.

She flings herself across the silk-heaped sleeping couch instead, face-down. There are piles of cushions covered in dramatic geometric brocade. One wall and the ceiling are all huge slanting panels of glass, granting a striking view of Tamaran’s huge cratered moons. On a probably related note, there are lush potted plants everywhere, completely covering the wall opposite the glass one, like the interior designers were trying to create the illusion that this princess palace is actually a forest glade.

Sunken weirdly into a depression in the floor toward the middle of the room, there’s a huge computer terminal with a control board Roy can’t make heads or tails of. “Kori,” says Dick after a while.

“It’s fine,” she says into her mattress. “It’s all fine. Go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Roy squints. “Uh,” he says pointedly. It is obviously not fine.

Kori raises her head to shoot an acid-green glare his way. “Go to _bed._ Komand’r is not going to have any of us assassinated, she’s too much of a wilting mossblossom. Everything else can wait for tomorrow.”

Grayson turns without further comment and heads for the door, so apparently that’s that. “Sleep well, I guess,” says Roy.

He and Dick sleep in three-hour shifts until dawn. Tamaran has a twenty-nine hour day, so they’re both pretty fully rested by the time a servant whose English has incredibly bad grammar—do these things deteriorate with every copy, like Xeroxes?—comes to take them to breakfast with the king and queen.

And princesses, and select courtiers. The conversation is mostly in English this morning, in deference to their guests, which is...nice. Roy still mostly keeps his mouth shut, aside from a brief highly fictionalized account of Oliver Queen's death in battle, which goes over well.

One of the most major things Roy’s learned so far about this planet is that Kori’s attitude toward violence really is a cultural thing.

Not her ideas about who it is valid to _murder_ , necessarily, but her ideas about how appropriate it is to kill your _enemies_ all the way to death. He hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other before, because their ideas have always lined up pretty well except he was more pragmatic about methodology—Grayson isn’t that different, either. But the two of them are weird on Earth in a way she isn’t on Tamaran.

It’s a definite _thing_ , he’s starting to realize, between listening in through his broken Tamaranean last night and talking with Kori’s family over breakfast. There’s no pussyfooting about a distinction between enemy combatants and enemy civilians, although admittedly this was a defensive war so it probably didn't come up much, and mercy for an enemy caught helpless is discussed only as a self-indulgent act of scorn, as _psychological warfare_ ; never as a kindness, let alone a moral issue.

Even Blackfire, whose mannerisms shade toward _gentle_ in a way nobody else around here really does, smiles quite happily at the memory of searing the heads off two dozen Citadel fighters who let their guards down thinking they were secure, before she busted through a bulkhead behind them and started throwing starbolts.

Which Roy would not have noticed was even weird if it wasn’t her talking, because that’s his normal. He’s just used to his normal not being _normal_. And here it just…is.

The only issue this inner circle of Myand'r's court seems divided on in this arena is the treatment of Tamaranean POWs whom the Citadel somehow convinced to fight against their own planet. One side of the debate argues that they’re victims and may still at heart be loyal to Tamaran, and it would be a betrayal to kill them unnecessarily without giving them the chance to switch back. This side includes Blackfire and seems to be the minority opinion—the majority voice holds that having chosen to be enemies, if they do not surrender they ought to be killed like enemies. You cannot betray someone who betrayed you first.

Kori is on this side. Roy chews his nut-flavored flatbread hard and says absolutely nothing.

After breakfast, the three of them split up. Kori offers to give the two of them a really thorough tour, but it’s obvious she’d rather luxuriate in being home on her much-lauded paradise planet, and Roy would rather get his own idea of things to start with. Grayson is probably just burned out on being around people.

To Roy’s good fortune, there’s handicapped access to most public places in Tamarus City, and absolutely everywhere in the Royal Palace. A lot of those sets of stairs and ramps and even ladders (Tamaraneans have a less stringent definition of ‘handicapped’) are awkward mismatched architectural additions, no doubt shoved into place hurriedly for Blackfire’s sake when she was a kid, but not all of them. So it takes him forever to get anywhere compared to everyone who can fly, but he _can_ get most places without asking for a lift.

When he asks, he gets given access to the palace garage of airbikes and skyvans, in case he needs to go somewhere that really is exclusively flying-accessible, and instruction on operating the things. The staff are perfectly polite. He wonders if that’s because he has royal connections, or if aliens get a pass on not being able to do everything people can.

(He makes a point of navigating these interactions in his terrible Tamaranean, instead of handing English out to all and sundry. None of the staff ever suggest that he ought to consider changing this policy, though for the airbike lesson they went and got somebody who’d gotten English from Blackfire, but some of the nobility he rubs elbows with do. Fairly emphatically, in a few cases.

He airily brushes this aside saying he’ll never get any practice if everyone speaks his own language to him all the time. It’s true, and it’s interesting that everybody respects that—not even grudgingly, for the most part, and he marks the ones who are grudging as either nativists or Kori’s political enemies. Potentially both.)

Outdoors, a lot of the access paths are actually the broad smooth limbs of trees that have been somehow coaxed over…what, _hundreds_ of years, into growing into the desired configuration.

It’s weird. The jungle and the city aren’t two separate places, so much as the city coexists with a specific patch of jungle. Various jungle creatures wander between buildings and along vine-edged stone boulevards, and Tamaraneans swim in the river that drifts through the capital, and on their way out casually stroke the foreheads of razor-toothed rhinoceros things that have come to the edge to drink. He sees somebody engaged in animated conversation with what appears to be a small dinosaur. There are birds on every possible surface, it sometimes seems like, and flowers anywhere the sunlight touches.

It’s gorgeous. Freaky as hell, sometimes, but damn is it pretty.

 _(Unfortunately,_ he thinks with his nose full of the dreamy perfume of a lily the size of his head and his mouth full of imaginary knives, _it was paradise.)_

Roy didn’t believe Kori, before, when she talked about her people ‘living in harmony’ with nature. A hell of a lot more harmony than humans, he’d have believed, but that was a low bar. The Diné did better than whites at that, but you still couldn’t call it _harmony_ , not _really_. How could the Tamaraneans manage much more? For one thing, they eat meat. _Lots_ of meat, actually, though the royal table may be skewing his assessment.

But apparently there’s a custom of never hunting hard beside the city, and always sending out a warning call so the targets will be ready to defend themselves or run. Near the cities, even the non-sapient wildlife knows down to the level of instinct that unless they aggress first, they are perfectly safe. Even over the hundred years of on-and-off bombings, which have diminished the presence of fauna, they’ve kept up this understanding. It’s apparently been eighty years since a child was injured by an animal in Tamarus. Out in the deep forest people are fair game, but only the toughest, angriest predator is going to try it.

It helps when he’s reminded that Tamaranean recorded history runs for seven _million_ years. They’ve had a long time to shape their world around them. They’ve _domesticated_ the entire jungle.

He still doesn’t understand how Tamaran can support its population—which is only about six hundred million but still, that’s partly because they haven’t bounced back yet from decades of war—without farms or, what do you call it, pasturing. When he finally asks, he gets an explanation of Tamaranean physiology that has to be repeated twice before he actually understands it, because the doctor (Tamaran does not have _scientists_ per se) keeps dropping back into his native language whenever he hits a technical term that he doesn’t know in English because _Roy_ doesn’t know it in English. Assuming English has words for all of these concepts in the first place, which it might not.

He wonders if the Grayson language download would have worked better. He wouldn’t be surprised if Grayson had read up on this biochem shit trying to figure out his powers.

What it boils down to is, Tamaraneans don’t eat for quite the same reasons humans do. Their metabolisms function mostly on stellar energy absorbed through the skin; calories from food are a nice bonus, or acceptable substitute in case of being stuck in the dark, or inside getting work done, or whatever, and not having a chance to sunbathe, but the main reason they eat is for the various vitamins and trace elements they can’t biosynthesize.

And because they _do_ continually replace old cells with new like most animals, and therefore need to supplement their mass, even when their energy reserves are full up. (This explains why Kori always eats so much more when she’s injured.) And, of course, for pleasure.

Pleasure is a very big deal on Tamaran.

“We have come to the planet of the sybarites,” Dick tells him mock-solemnly on the second day. Dick let them put him in Tamaranean dress and looks like some kind of tropical bird, crouching on one of the face-height corner benches in red, green, and gold, but mostly the ash-pale of bared limbs and stomach. It’s a kind of baffling contrast to the way he normally swathes himself fingertip to toe in nondescript grey, but when in Rome apparently. (And no danger of being found by old enemies, here.)

Roy is still wearing his own clothes, two days into a protracted battle with the royal tailors to get something nice enough for the coronation that does not leave him mostly naked, and ideally which also says ‘alien,’ without being robes. Because firstly, he doesn’t want to wear robes, and secondly, on Tamaran they seem to be worn mostly by children, and then only in formal situations. So he _really_ doesn’t want to wear robes. It would probably help his case if Grayson wasn’t undermining all claims that humans have a cultural nudity taboo, but hey.

He wishes he’d held onto one of the tuxes he left behind in Star City. That would do it.

“Yeah?” he asks, taking a step back so he won’t get a crick in his neck looking up at his ally. “What did you see now?”

“Three new ways to combine food and sex,” Greywing reports. Roy wonders if any of those would be new to _him;_ Grayson is not exactly worldly when it comes to that kind of thing, though apparently when he’s not personally involved he doesn’t recoil, either. Interesting.

“Voyeur,” Roy says.

Dick shakes his head. “Just nosy.”

Roy shrugs. He’s not convinced there’s that big a difference.

* * *

Kori’s fighting with the tailors, too. They had her clothes made for her before she arrived, and planned to just adjust them to her current measurements, except she wants her back covered and is refusing to wear anything around her wrists. The latter is getting about the reaction you’d expect if the Vice President-elect refused to wear shoes on Inauguration Day, but she’s not budging.

Which Roy actually understands, but like hell is he explaining if she won’t. He thinks she should suck it up and either explain her reasons or wear the damn wristbands, it’s not like these ones are magic, but if she’s anything it’s stubborn and it’s not his call what sartorial hill she dies on.

After lunch on the third day, he suggests a cape as a compromise. She winds up with one that billows widely, with its corners fixed to shiny gold loops just below her elbows, above the offending wrist zone. Roy is the entire tailoring department’s new favorite alien, and they make him shiny embroidered red pants without any further demur.

(He has to give them an existing pair of pants to use as a pattern, and they totally take them apart at the seams and do not put them back together, but it’s an acceptable sacrifice.)

The opening ceremonies start in the afternoon on the fourth day, and range from pretty much the same ritual hunt they skipped on day one—first you chase a very nimble talking dinosaur with a net-gun for bragging points, then you quickly and humanely kill something large and dumb called a skorr and cook it and _share it with_ the talking dinosaur previously chased, because why not—to having Kom hover for like an hour, while people ceremonially hang jewelry off her.

The day culminates in another feast, and once again Roy and Dick are at the high table, seated by Kori’s elbow. They’ve switched positions since the welcome banquet, which Roy has enough of a sense of how things are done around here to be pretty sure isn’t a statement about his status but a reaction to how much more closely Grayson has stuck to Starfire the last few days, compared to Roy. It means he’s even more shortchanged for conversation, since the guy on his left is one of the ones he offended over the last couple of days by not wanting to share English, and Grayson isn’t a chatterbox at the best of times and won’t thank Roy for trying to get him to open up in public.

This is fine. Knowing he’s got a partner in paranoia makes it easier to stay on guard without stressing out. There’s no reason to be stressed, really. If anyone had listened in on Kori’s evil schemes the first night, they’d have said something by now if they were going to, and he can trust their Princess not to turn around and stab anybody in plain sight. She’s even faking a positive attitude, though no one expects her to be _happy_.

Roy’s once again been drinking sparingly. He’d expected wine, at the feast on the night they arrived, but the royal table at least was stocked instead with a thick beverage quadruple-distilled from nectar. Just the smell is potent enough to knock out a yak.

He’s glad he hasn’t let himself get more than slightly buzzed when Kori’s parents reveal (with seating arrangements as their segue) that Komand’r is getting married. _Tomorrow morning._

At least they told _her_ ahead of time. She’s the one who explains it to the humans in attendance, actually—with some input from Kori, who’s trying to act natural but is angry enough Roy’s surprised her drink hasn’t caught fire. It’s about a hundred and ninety proof, after all; it wouldn’t take much.

It turns out Myand’r of House Tykayl is, technically, the ruler not so much of Tamaran as of the nation of Tamarus, which consists of the entire northern hemisphere and then some. Tamarus has been boss of the entire planet, and its monarch the planetary leader, for the last few thousand years, but the countries on the southern continent that weren’t historically Tamarus still have their own sense of political identity and their own sub-rulers, from among whom a chief southern king is elected, or something. Depending on the political situation of the moment, from what Roy can gather, chief southern king can be anything from a rubber stamp for the high king in Tamarus to a major political threat.

At the moment, there’s enough bad feeling left over from the war that secession is actually on the table, but united Tamaran has existed for so long that even if Myand’r _wanted_ to let them walk, it would end in civil war. Which would result in a new invasion. The southern states seem prepared to risk that. Myand’r isn’t.

Which means the heirship now comes, it turns out, with a new codicil: marriage to this southern king.

His name is Karras, new-crowned king of Kalapatt, and he’s on the yellow end of the Tamaranean skin color spectrum. He and Blackfire are going to have funny-looking babies. Maybe a sort of pale gold.

“At least you get out of _that,_ ” Roy points out to Kori as softly as he can having to lean over Grayson, jerking his head toward Karras. He doesn’t seem that bad, as slimy political types go, and he’s about Kom’s age and not yet fully settled on his throne, but extorting marriage through threat of war is not on Roy’s ‘fan of’ list.

Kori’s mouth twists. “As if I would put up with that.” She swigs viciously at her drink. “The southern states have always been opportunistic and disloyal. We are not so crippled from the war that we could not teach them their error with a show of force. I would do it with my own hands before I submitted to that plan. But always my father’s first resort has been to sell his daughters, rather than face war. He shames his grandmothers.”

Grayson’s eyes stop roving over the company and snap to Kori. “He sold you.”

Roy checks to see if they’re talking loud enough for either king to hear.

Kori snorts, and knocks back the rest of her goblet of murder-mead. “The Citadel demanded me as the condition of a peace that would give us time to recover. Our people had been driven to the brink. They did not even want me, except as a sign of my father’s desperation.”

She refills her cup in silence, swirls the yellow stuff with her eyes and lips narrowed. “I am the third woman of my House to be sacrificed so. My grandmother was the second, and gave herself up after Grandfather and their two elder sons were killed in battle defying the demand. The Citadel makes war as a sport, and as a business, against us and all the other worlds of Vega; whenever we are pressed too hard, they have exacted tribute and retreated, rather than pressing to our extermination. Their malice has always been impersonal. Ours is personal.”

She smiles, briefly, and it’s not a nice expression. “There is a reason Komand’r won such acclaim across Tamaran through slaughtering them in such numbers. Would that I could have been here for the killing.”

According to the condensed religious summary he’s picked up, the Citadel are supposed to be some kind of hybrid race of the Okaarans, who are an ancient ally of the Tamaraneans, and some kind of space monsters. The first one was apparently the evil twin out of the goddess X’Hal’s two offspring with a rapey monster-alien under laboratory conditions. He’s not clear on how that one specimen is supposed to have led to the existence of an entire _species_ , but labs aside that’s how origin myths usually work, so whatever.

The point is, the scale of racial hatred here is right off any chart he could have brought from home, and he thought _humans_ were good at prejudice.

Of course, humans will frequently live peaceably side-by-side with and be cursorily polite to people they despise for dumb reasons. Tamaran is not a place where that kind of wishy-washy middle ground stuff flies. No wonder Kori bought into their partnership so hard; she was raised to think it’s perfectly normal to divide the world into total strangers, fast friends, and mortal enemies, and never stay neutral for longer than it takes to form an opinion about which of the latter two categories someone belongs in.

And Grayson is like a giant kid because he was deprived of social interaction growing up. So Roy is actually the only one without an excuse.

Oh well.

The point is, politics are clearly happening, and Kori seems pretty likely to get herself involved up to the neck. It’s time to stop coasting and hoping she just drops her plans for planetary domination. Roy pops a soft-boiled egg the size of his thumbnail into his mouth and chews as he reflects.

One of the women across the table has been giving him very clear speaking looks all evening. He’s looked back. She’s tall, though not as tall as Kori, and also on the yellower end of the skin spectrum, which seems to mean her family was from the southern continent not too long ago. Thanks to his own paranoid data-collection, he even knows who she is: Rylitt of House Ch'anya, one of Myand’r’s more important nonmilitary advisors.

She’s married, but that’s not an issue here—not that Roy has ever considered it particularly important, but on Tamaran he doesn’t have to worry about being subtle to avoid pissing off her husband, who also has a lot of political clout. Promises of sexual fidelity aren’t unheard-of on Tamaran, but they aren’t an intrinsic part of marriage and it seems like they’re mostly used early in courtship to encourage bonding, and anyway it’s considered the responsibility of the parties to keep their promise. (Not that _pressuring_ someone to break one isn’t considered asshole behavior, but you’re not expected to check whether one exists before getting involved; if someone has an oath to keep, they’ll mention it. Unless they’re a faithless asshole, which Roy assumes is still a thing, even when monogamy is entirely voluntary. People are people.)

She’s a lot older than him, but that is totally not an issue. She’s hot as hell.

He tips his cup at her and starts looking back with _intent._

* * *

He makes it back to their suite about an hour before dawn, hair a mess and all the belt-loops on his fancy pants snapped, and finds Dick sitting up, polishing knives.

He relaxes when he sees Roy. “Had fun?” he asks.

Roy shrugs. “Yeah, pretty much. She seemed happy, and that’s gonna be useful even if everything doesn’t go to hell. You got food?”

Grayson tosses him an energy bar, which wasn’t remotely what Roy was picturing but hey, a little piece of home never goes  amiss, even if it has granola in it. “Political?” Grayson asks, and fuck Roy is so damn sick of that carefully neutral voice, just faintly different from his standard neutral-without-effort voice. Like hell a Talon has any space to judge him.

He strips the wrapper off the energy bar with way more crackling emphasis than necessary. “Yeah? So? I want some contacts around here that don’t depend on Kori, and Rylitt is hot and the sex was good. Is there some kind of reason there’s a problem with any of that?”

“No,” Grayson says after a couple of seconds. “Like we said before. What use you make of your body is your choice.”

Roy rolls his eyes and bites vengefully into granola. “God, you’re acting like this is the first time or something. You really think I haven’t slept around politically before? I mean sure, mob politics are a little different, but it’s the same idea.”

Grayson abruptly looks _furious._ If Roy didn’t know him he wouldn’t have realized at first, because it’s subtle, sort of a quality of stillness. But then the anger turns into an actual, intentional expression, and he says, “Queen? Did that to you?”

“No, _fuck,_ ” Roy almost punches the wall but it’s stone and he’d regret it. His throat is dry and gummy from the granola bar. “It has nothing to _do_ with Oliver, what do you…ugh."

He blows out a frustrated breath. “Look, something I’m starting to think you don’t get is, I wasn’t in the same boat as you, okay? Yeah, he was in charge, he owned most of the stuff and all, but I was an _officer_. I was his right hand man, that meant the organization _belonged to me_ , too, its success and failure was basically the same thing as mine. I was somebody important. And since I had that much invested in the Black Bow, I was willing to go a pretty fucking long way to make sure we won.

“So yeah, I seduced people. I killed people. I sold cons and conned sales and ordered people tortured to death for crossing us. I _chose_ that life, Grayson. I was in control. I’m not a _victim._ ”

And fuck if he’s going to put up with being judged for that, but still better than being pitied for something he took on himself.

Then he looks at Grayson’s face, and wishes he could backpedal. Shit.

He just called one of the scariest people he’s ever known a victim _to his face._ Is he secretly suicidal, is that why he keeps alienating the guy like this? Dick’s hands curl up slowly, and then even more slowly they uncurl. It’s creepier, Roy decides, when he’s crouching above you than just sitting normally in front of you. But it’s _also_ creepier when the table in front of him is covered in sharp shiny weapons, so maybe about even really.

“Yes,” Grayson says, and _God_ he sounds just like he used to when they were kids.

“I’ve made my choices,” Roy says. _Even the stupid ones._

“So have I,” Grayson says softly. And Roy’s pretty sure Owlman never gave him any choices, but then that part ended years ago, didn’t it? He wonders if Grayson tried to get out of the business. Tries to imagine him passing himself off as normal. Working a nine-to-five.

He could do it. His self-control is pretty good, and God knows there are enough psychotic losers banging around making a mostly-honest living one way or another. As long as he kept under Wayne and Wilson’s respective radars, he could do it. He could make it work.

But Dick’s like Roy. In this, at least. It’s one thing to keep your head down and eat boredom and humiliation when you have to, when that’s just how you survive, but when you know you have it in you to be more, to survive, to _thrive_ —well. If he tried to get out, Roy isn’t surprised he wound up back in.

He lets out all his breath like a gust of wind. “Yeah, well. We all do what we need to.”

“I’m sorry,” says Grayson. And he’s impassive when he says it, almost, which is—what? Does that mean he’s saying it out of obligation but doesn’t want Roy to think he _means_ it or anything, or that he means it enough he isn’t trying to fake any extra emotion, or he means it and isn’t letting any of his feelings show because he feels just as vulnerable apologizing like that as Roy would?

He shrugs, pours a cup of water from the pitcher the palace servants keep filled on a decorative credenza thing along one wall. “Yeah, well. It’s cool.” He drinks the cup down, then collapses onto the nearest comfy chair and finishes his energy bar.

Grayson rips the shiny wrapper off another one, and starts to munch it himself.

Roy catches a whiff and scowls. “Hey, yours is chocolate, why did I get cranberry?”

Grayson smirks. Yeah, they’re fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is set a few years later than the Teen Titans arc it's based on, because of the amount of time this Kori spent under Superwoman's control, and there has not actually been a civil war because instead of actively trying to make things worse so she can seize power, Kom has been helpful. 
> 
> Karras' father died in the interim so he's removed as a political factor, because he never actually _did_ anything other than make Karras not responsible for this mess.


End file.
